The Mary Pickford Institute is a non-profit organization in Los Angeles dedicated to cultivating awareness of film pioneer Mary Pickford’s life, preserving her work, furthering her philanthropic legacy and honoring her creativity. Founded in 2003 by the Mary Pickford Foundation, MPI actively serves the community through our public research library as well as educational initiatives using film, video and digital media to empower students by helping them realize they have a voice that is worthy of being heard.
Our resources and services provide a bridge from early cinema to modern filmmaking for scholars, students, film buffs and the general public.
Our projects ignite an excitement for learning while building participants’ sense of accomplishment and self-esteem by utilizing teaching tools that are immediate, relevant and current. MPI's current educational outreach project is the Mobile Film Classroom.
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The Mary Pickford Foundation approved the purchase of many interesting items from the “Pickfair Estate Auction” that was held on November 22-23, 2008 in Beverly Hills. The special prize of the collection was Mary Pickford's personal autograph book, which sold for a gavel price of $19,000. This leather-bound volume was carried by Mary on several of her trips abroad. Its first signatures date from 1926. Some of the most famous autographs include Charles Chaplin, Maurice Chevalier, Amelia Earhart, Thomas Edison, Dwight D. and Mamie Eisenhower, Henry Ford, Glenn Martin, Lord and Lady Mountbatten, Max Reinhardt, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, Jonas Salk, George Bernard Shaw, and H.G. Wells. Other items acquired for the Mary Pickford Institute include a collection of scrapbooks dedicated to the careers of Mary Pickford and Charles “Buddy” Rogers, and a number of small personal items belonging to both of them. The Pickford books include a scrapbook maintained by Mary's friend Edna Wright, which contains many snapshots and some tinted frames from feature films made before 1920. Many of the photos and clippings in this book contain charming personal notes and notations from Mary herself.
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On January 14 the Mary Pickford Institute was visited by Anke Brouwers, a doctoral candidate from the University of Antwerp, Belgium. Ms. Brouwers is writing her dissertation on early “lost” features of Mary Pickford. She came to Los Angeles on scholarship for a brief trip to visit Mary's adopted home town, and to research her subject at the Academy's Margaret Herrick Library and at MPI. Working here with curator Hugh Munro Neely, Anke viewed and scanned photographs from several Pickford feature films, and looked through several of our newly acquired scrapbooks, containing images and notes from the films in question. As with every visitor to the Institute, Ms. Brouwers signed Mary Pickford's personal guest book. “My visit here was definitely worth the long journey from Antwerp!” she wrote, “I hope to be back one day.” Anke will send MPI a copy of her doctoral dissertation on the lost Pickford features when it is ready.
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Since completing the arrangement, description, and re-housing of the Mary Pickford Institute's archives during his internship, Paul Jordan has moved into the field of Digital Archives. He worked first at Occidental College, in Los Angeles, California and is currently the Digital Archivist for the International Monetary Fund in Washington, DC. In both institutions he's focused on the ground-up creation of a digital archive, wrestling with difficulty of finding records of enduring value amongst the hundreds of thousands and millions of digital documents that are created by the institutions. It's as fascinating as it is tremendously difficult. As such, he would like to give everyone a piece of advice: worry about obsolescence, both in hardware and software. If you leave digital video created today alone, in twenty years it will most likely be unreadable. The software used to view it will have disappeared, and the CD or DVD or magnetic tape it is stored upon will have degraded. Unlike a book, which can stand decades, sometimes even centuries of neglect, digital files require frequent migration and care so that the projects you slave over today will still be able to entertain people in the years to come. |
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